Matriarch's rescue, then irreplaceable loss

Grandmother protects Edgar and other children, but her death results in family's disintegration

By the end of 1999, the family recorded a Christmas video. They recited greetings to relatives in the U.S., including Edgar’s mother and father.

Edgar Jimenez Lugo gets reaquainted with his father, David Antonio Jimenez Solis, at their home in Tejalpa, Mexico. David had recently returned from the United States when this photo was taken.— Armando Arizmendi

Edgar Jimenez Lugo gets reaquainted with his father, David Antonio Jimenez Solis, at their home in Tejalpa, Mexico. David had recently returned from the United States when this photo was taken.
/ Armando Arizmendi

Playfully held by the ear and forced to look straight into the camera, Edgar fumbled to repeat after his sister, “Mamá, te quiero mucho.”

“Mucho,” is all Edgar could say.

By New Year’s, Edgar’s father had returned from California after serving time on drug charges.

David Antonio Jimenez Solis lived with the family, “but he was doing his own thing,” his oldest daughter said.

“He never showed love. He’d just cook us something to eat every once in a while,” said Myrna Jimenez Lugo, a 25-year-old mother of two who lives in Tejalpa.

For Edgar, Carmen was the one true protector.

The boy was proving to be a handful around the house, throwing tantrums that set him apart from his siblings. Edgar sometimes ran away from home, only to be found at a nearby stream searching for turtles.

No one thought too much about the disruptions until Edgar went to school — and got expelled over and over.

His aunts and sisters tried to ease the load on an ailing diabetic grandmother. They appealed to school leaders to give Edgar a second, third and fourth chance.

Cracks in the facade

A warm, year-round climate and towering fields of sugar cane first gave rise to Cuernavaca’s colonial haciendas.

As the burgeoning capital of Morelos state became a reprieve for affluent Mexicans over the decades, elite drug smugglers moved in — establishing themselves behind the walls of refurbished estates and well-tended mansions.

A semblance of order was held in place by cozy, long-standing ties between organized crime and authorities, but cracks were developing in that facade by the late 1990s.

The governor of Morelos, a retired general who once oversaw a drug interdiction center, had to resign as evidence mounted that Cuernavaca was allowed to serve as a base of operations for Mexico’s pre-eminent drug trafficker, Amado Carrillo Fuentes.

Nicknamed “Lord of the Skies,” Carrillo Fuentes moved vast quantities of cocaine through Mexico while buying protection from authorities. He died in 1998 during plastic surgery.

Mexico’s political transformation foreshadowed a tumultuous era for organized crime. The country ended 71 years of one-party rule after Vicente Fox won the 2000 presidential election.

Old rules of the drug-smuggling game were being abandoned, said George Grayson, a professor at the College of William & Mary and an expert in Mexican and Latin American politics.

“You paid officials at the local, state and national levels. You got to import, store, process, export your drugs,” he said. “But you didn’t sell drugs in Mexico. You didn’t have weapons more powerful than the army. You showed deference to public officials, and you didn’t touch civilians.

“That was an ugly, corrupt, venal system. But it put a restraint on the activities of the drug cartels.”

Fox, a conservative-minded politician in cowboy boots, steadily made life more difficult for drug lords.

He worked to purge federal police ranks and clean up the customs service at airports and shipping terminals. With help from U.S. authorities, he began the dismantling of the Arellano Félix drug cartel, which had dominated smuggling routes through Tijuana since the 1980s.